The NCSA Blue Waters petascale supercomputer is getting massive amounts of Spectra Logic tape library storage.
It will start with four 17-frame Spectra T-Finity tape libraries for near-line data archive needs in the first year. Two more will be installed the following year. This means a raw capacity of 328PB and read/write …

It does make you wonder. The size of the drive does not take into account size of tape media storage and size of the the jukebox to load and unload tape. Ok.. so compare numbers... lets say against the Iomega Prestige USB 3.0 hard drive 1.5TB available for just over $200 @ frys (and includes hardware encryption - data throughput is at least 200Mbit/sec - interface is 5Gbit. The size is 1/2 of a TK50.. but 1/10th of the IBM TS1140.. and gets power from USB interface-- much less than 600 watts).

The highest density media for the IBM TS1140 comes in at $406/tape for JY media, $246/tape on JC media (4TB - media).

To me, it doesn't make sense. I can place 10x1.5TB drives in the space of that tape drive alone. I can also place 2x1.5 TB drives in the space for each tape cartridge. I don't need a jukebox for the hard drives. Power footprint will probably be lower on the hard drives (can power down/spin down modern drives). Massive RAID will easily dwarf the bandwidth and access times available from a tape system. Space footprint for equivalent storage will also be lower with hard drives - don't have the jukeboxes, and the cabling and controllers using hard drives will roughly equal the cabling and controllers needed for the jukeboxes and tape drives.

Need I also mention, 1 IBM TS1140 has a list price of $42,995? Yes that is about 43 thousand dollars. I haven't even priced in the jukeboxes. Considering that the tape media roughly matches the price of the hard drive of the same capacity... pricewise, spacewise, powerwise, capacitywise, speedwise -- it doesn't make sense.

@just_me

"Considering that the tape media roughly matches the price of the hard drive of the same capacity... pricewise, spacewise, powerwise, capacitywise, speedwise -- it doesn't make sense."

It does when you consider the (un)reliability, longevity and fragility of hard drives vs tape and then factor in the labour costs to keep the disk arrays maintained, etc (figure on one failed drive a day in arrays that size, plus 3-4 instances of silent corruption. Tape error correction is a couple of orders stronger than disk ECC.)